RELIGION / POETRY"For the past fifty years Nevit Ergin has been working to bring into English the entirety of Rumi's vast Divan-i Kebir. This last volume is the most incendiary, and it clearly dissolves the boundaries of organized religion and national ego that keep us from the table of friendship that Rumi invites us to. . . . We are very grateful to Dr. Ergin for his life's work."Coleman Barks, translator of The Essential RumiAfter his overwhelming and life-altering encounters with Shams of Tabriz, Rumi, the great thirteenth-century mystic, poet, and originator of the whirling dervishes, let go of many of the precepts of formal religion, insisting that only a complete personal dissolving into the larger energies of God could provide the satisfaction that the heart so desperately seeks. He began to speak spontaneously in the language of poetry, and his followers compiled his more than forty-four thousand verses into twenty-three volumes, collectively called the Divan-i Kebir.When Nevit Ergin decided to translate Rumi's divan into English, he enlisted the help of the Turkish government, which was happy to participate. The first twenty-two volumes were published without difficulty, but the government withdrew its support and refused to participate in the publication of the final volume due to its openly heretical nature. Now, in The Forbidden Rumi, Nevit Ergin and Will Johnson present for the first time in English Rumi's poems on love and intoxication from this forbidden volume. The collection is grouped into three sections: songs to Shams and God, songs of advice and admonition, and songs of heresy. Rumi explains that in order to transform our consciousness, we must let go of ingrained habits and embrace new ones. In short, we must become heretics.NEVIT O. ERGIN, a Turkish-born surgeon, is the original translator of the entirety of Rumi's 44,829 verses into English. He has been a student of Sufism and the poetry of Rumi since 1955 and published his first Rumi translation in 1992. With the publication of The Forbidden Rumi, his translation of Rumi's work is complete. He lives in California. WILL JOHNSON is the founder and director of the Institute for Embodiment Training, which combines Western somatic psychotherapy with Eastern meditation practices. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Rumi: Gazing at the Beloved. He lives in British Columbia.